Personalization can be nice; looked at one way, it’s what leads the bartender at a favorite pub to get your Guinness the moment you arrive. It can be kind of a drag, too, though – do you want your friendly neighborhood pharmacist to remember your every problem? – and so personalization was weighed against privacy in an SES Chicago session called “Battle of the Browsers.”
(Coverage of SES Chicago continues at Murdok Videos. Keep an eye on Murdok for more notes and videos from the event this week.)
Mike Grehan
The three speakers were Chris Sherman, the executive editor of Search Engine Land, Mike Grehan, Acronym Media‘s global KDM officer, and Gary Stein, the director of strategy at Ammo Marketing. Rather than one by one present and sit down, they conducted more of a discussion.
Stein made an interesting statement by beginning, “I don’t think we should call Chrome a browser.” Sherman then backed him up by calling it more of an application.
Sherman also claimed, “Google is making Chrome their new operating system,” and pointed to the way in which Consumer WatchDog is concerned about Chrome privacy issues.
Grehan countered by saying, “In order for search to get better, the search engines have to know more about you.” Sherman acknowledged, too, that the security issue isn’t new because ISPs have had access to all sorts of info for a very long time. Plus there’s the amount of data that people are freely disclosing on Facebook and MySpace to consider.
So were you hoping for a decisive Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Internet Explorer decision? Sorry. After all that, Grehan concluded, “There is no safe browser.”
